That's what the Economist is for.
I have loved Economist, The Intelligence podcast everyday. 20 minutes covering 3 topics with experts.
The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
51–60 of 378 posts
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#52These links discuss "news diets" as a counter to the problem of news as low-quality information and/or information pollution:
http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when....
http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/
And here's a similar recent discussion on HN:
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#53I found I liked watching news after I got a police-scanner and could listen to things as they happened. Police/Fire/Ambulance scratched the itch of "what is going on right now" better then the news of 'What happened yesterday' that the media offered.
It also had the added benefit of being LOCAL, when my local news mostly covered tidbits of national interest.
I'd still tune-in to local radio to get the followup or fuller-details of an event.
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#54The article and the comments express the desire for news to be an effective tool to inform and educate the public. While appealing, this idea has never worked in the past, and there's no evidence that it can work in the near future. The reason is not that the media or the journalists do something wrong. Rather, the vast majority of the public is simply not interested in being educated or informed. You can send the be…
This sort of cynic pessimism is getting out of hand...
By most any measure, today's western democracies are the best place, and time in history, to be alive: life expectancy, crime, food availability, mobility.
This is also true of education and "being informed", although those are harder to measure. But literacy rates, high school and advanced degree proliferation, books being published, and of course internet access should be decent proxies.
That's not even including the vast improvements people who aren't white, able-bodied men have seen. Just ask around among women over 70 and you will find plenty who wanted to go to medical school and were stymied for whatever reason. My mother was told that, yes, she can matriculate. "But as long as I am professor, no woman will pass [some required class]"
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#55I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it. I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me a…
Be careful about what kind of news you ignore. The punishment to who ignore politics, per example, is being governed by who cares.
pretty much nothing the last 4 presidents have done has affected me
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That quote is literally from his testimony earlier today. So if he repeats the same claim every day, NYT should displace something else to report on every instance? No.
William Barr has never made that claim. And he went on to say, right after that quote, that the Justice Department is conducting an investigation into this. That's very big news! Trump tweeting about how Obama spied on him is very different than the Justice Department dedicating resources to investigating the FBI, Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
Let's say for the sake of argument that it qualifies as news. Does it change the overall argument that "news" outlets try to claim far too much of our attention for topics they've already saturated, in the process failing to bring new events to our attention? Or are we just sealioning here?
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#57I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it. I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me a…
Be careful about what kind of news you ignore. The punishment to who ignore politics, per example, is being governed by who cares.
That seems like it should hold true, generally. However, it doesn't seem to hold true in present day US politics. Most people who pay attention aren't any less punished than those who don't. Very little of the political news has to do with policy or issues that are up for meaningful debate, and when it does it lacks nuance. Sometimes when unpopular legislation is in the pipeline there's not even an adequate description of what it is in popular media, let alone meaningful debate. Mostly I see divisive partisan propaganda and finger pointing. There's evidence to suggest voters preferences don't really impact policy in the long term, such as the Princeton study.
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#58I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it. I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me a…
Did the same thing about 4 years ago and haven’t looked back. I find though that a lot of people are actually offended by it since I have no clue what thing they and everyone else is outraged about. I get accused of not caring, being disengaged, blah blah blah. It’s difficult to explain to people who are still deep in outrage mode, so I mostly avoid taking about it. My life is so much better since cutting out the new…
Honest question, how do you turn off your empathy for the suffering of your fellow countrymen? Which is what ignoring their plight would require (at least, it would for me).
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#59I've had several discussions about this and, as inhumane as it might sound...I'm not sure what value news has in its current form. I don't feel like I'm learning more about other humans, I'm just being spoon-fed a carefully crafted narrative.
If the purpose of news is to disseminate useful information then it has failed. It's now about opinion, entertainment, advertising and maximising engagement (usually by getting people pissed off because misery loves company).
There was a recent story in the UK about a young man from the North West who plotted to murder an MP, who also happened to be a paedophile and a white supremacist (according to reports). Most of the news is a dramatic retelling of how a young kid could get to that point so soon. Our national broadcaster, the BBC, gave him the gift of notoriety and I can't imagine what that has done to his ego except to say he was right.
That isn't news, it's fetishising a burgeoning problem in our politics and titillating readers.
Upskirting celebrities getting out of cars and getting sly bikini shots from a telescopic lens somehow has more priority over proper investigative journalism that can have a positive, legal outcome.
In a more simplistic way, we revel in the pain of other people.
Re: The Urgent Quest for Slower, Better News
#60I stopped reading the news about a year ago. I felt like my emotions were being manipulated by a sharply-honed system built precisely to invoke outrage and draw you in to read more and more of it. I've been able to direct my focus and energy to much more productive tasks since I disconnected. Of course I entirely missed that whole Supreme Court thing until after it was over, and I have no idea what people around me a…
Be careful about what kind of news you ignore. The punishment to who ignore politics, per example, is being governed by who cares.
The amount of attention I personally pay to the news does not appear to have a nonzero effect on the quality of politicians we get.